In the South of France, a Utopian Town Inspired by Ancient Pyramids

How do you build a town from scratch? For an answer, you might look to two metropolises that sprang up in just a handful of years during the 1950s and ’60s: Chandigarh, the Swiss French architect Le Corbusier’s planned city in northern India, and Brasília, the sprawling capital of Brazil, designed by the urban planner Lúcio Costa and the architect Oscar Niemeyer. Far less well known, but inspired by the same modernist belief in architecture’s utopian potential, is La Grand Motte, an otherworldly resort town of curving white concrete towers spread across nearly 2,000 acres of former marshland in the South of France.

The magnum opus of the Turkish-born French architect Jean Balladur, La Grande Motte began in 1965 as one of several working-class resort towns built by the French government in response to the post-World War II vacation boom. (Later in the decade, a law increased workers’ annual holiday allowance from three to four weeks.) These places were fashioned as cheaper, family-friendly alternatives to the ritzier attractions of the Côte d’Azur, farther east. La Grande Motte (the Big Mound), a 40-minute drive east of Montpellier and named after a nearby sand dune, was to offer affordable accommodation for 37,800 tourists, in the form of vacation homes, rental apartments and campsites.

While Balladur, who died in 2002, realized this goal, his vision was met with scorn: In 1972, the magazine L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui called La Grande Motte “architectural pollution.” Over the next 30 years, the resort expanded to include a shopping district, two schools, a church, a town hall and a golf course — earning it unflattering comparisons to Florida and Disneyland. But the town also became an ideological blueprint for future urban developments in France, an example of how a supposedly uninhabitable area — in this case, one that was windswept and mosquito-ridden — might become home to a mostly peaceful, self-contained community. In 2010, the French Ministry of Culture formally recognized La Grande Motte as a place of “Outstanding Contemporary Architecture,” making it the first town to receive that designation.